Lancaster’s Physics Department hosted two interactive displays at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition back in July, which attracted over 10,000 school children and their families.

The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is a free annual science festival hosted at the Royal Society in London over a week in July. Placements at the exhibition are highly competitive and prestigious, but this year members of both the Low Temperature and the Particle Physics teams at Lancaster were selected to showcase their displays to the public – “A Quantum View of an Invisible Universe” and “Capturing Nature’s Ghosts” respectively.

“A Quantum View of an Invisible Universe” was spearheaded by Dr Michael Thompson, and featured elements of two research collaborations that Lancaster is part of: QUEST-DMC and QSHS. Both projects use novel technologies to broaden the worldwide searches for dark matter particles. The team transformed these complicated projects into a series of interactive games, including a simulation on how to heat and cool a low-temperature fridge, a pendulum simulating a parametric amplifier amplifying axion signals, and “dark matter in a suitcase” to help demonstrate the unexpected gravitational forces dark matter can be seen to be having on stars in space.

The “Capturing Nature’s Ghosts” exhibit was supported by Professor Jaroslaw Nowak and his Lancaster team based on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE’s exhibition showcased the physics of neutrinos (also known as “ghost” particles) and the UK’s main contributions to DUNE’s construction: the anode wire planes used to reconstruct neutrino interactions within DUNE’s detectors. The Lancaster-based team – with assistance from Physics’ mechanical and electronics workshops - built an interactive model showing neutrino oscillation phenomenon, a model of the DUNE detector, and the facility which will host the experiment.

DUNE is a collaborative project being undertaken by more than 1000 scientists across 34 countries, with a sizable contingent coming from Lancaster. The exhibition was hosted as a collaborative effort of UK DUNE institutions.

Both exhibits proved highly popular amongst the visitors over the course of the week, and were visited by thousands of members of the public.

On the success of the exhibition, Professor Nowak commented: “It was a lot of fun to work on the preparation of the exhibition and to be there to talk to many people fascinated by science and physics. The Lancaster team took on the difficult task of preparing part of the exhibition, which had to be planned, designed, and built here at Lancaster. I am grateful to Phelton Stephenson from the Physics Department’s mechanical workshop and Ashely Wilson from Physics’ electronics workshop and their teams for all of their assistance in bringing the project to life. I also want to extend my gratitude to Lancaster DUNE researchers Dr Isobel Mawby and Dr Linhui Gu for their roles in preparing the exhibition, as well as both the Faculty and the Department as a whole for providing the support needed to make our showcase possible.”

Dr Thompson added: “Exhibiting at the Royal Society was a fantastic opportunity and we thoroughly enjoyed it. From school children to grandparents, it was great to see so much interest in our research, especially after all the hard work that went into creating the exhibit. We had an amazing team at the event including colleagues and students from Lancaster, Royal Holloway University of London, and University of Oxford. I’m very grateful to FST and the University for the financial support they provided and also to the graduate students and undergraduate interns who spent the summer putting everything together. I would be very keen to do it again!”